I like your take. My take, is that Orwell is actually a closet totalitarian, and was singing the praises of such, albeit covertly and in the guise which he knew the public could fawn about and accept. I imagine Orwell smoking his pipe and chuckling to himself, "...and they thought it was against totalitarianism, that's why they swallowed it whole!" After all, the Party is really the victor and hero of the novel. The hopeful appendix could itself be a historical revision of a future "more perfect" incarnation of the Party. I think the 2-minutes hate against Goldstein, is the same 2-minutes hate against "Totalitarian States" that Orwell cynically evokes from a public he knew was ready to go rabid on this thing, against which, I think he believed, resistance was futile. I think he saw himself as greasing the wheels of that. So he's mocking his audience's gullibility while proving his point that totalitarianism is the only thing that can rule them, and selling them such via the backchannel of this novel everyone believes to be against that. I think, in this lens, Orwell is as the biggest political-social thinker of last 200 years, and he carried it off without being recognized as what he was doing, the ultimate power play, which makes it all the more impressive. I really shouldn't write this here, people will probably go crazy. But it's nice to see a fellow differentthinker, so I braved it. A final thought is that there's this concept call dramatic catharsis, in comedy, where the mockery of something is commonly seen as a way to remove its power, but in actuality simply provides a useless outlet for people's frustrations and further acclimates them to it. So, Italian plays mocking the state were how the people coped with it, but the state rolled on, better them cope than revolt. In that lens, 1984 is sort of a pre-catharsis that greases the wheels for the entrance of totalitarianism, by convincing everyone, as another commenter adroitly noted, "of the inevitable demise of English socialism". So Orwell was faking the death of totalitarianism in the mass consciousness, to provide cover for the introduction of totalitarianism. Sort of like that scene in the Dark Knight, where somebody brings the "body of the Joker" to Gambol's hideout, where the Joker promptly comes back to life and takes over.

Having read other Orwell works, in which he appears pretty pinko, I'm not sure about your take, but am happy to discuss its motivations.

Certainly I believe that he could chuckle over Animal Farm being eagerly taken up and sold as an anti-communist, rather than an anti-dog-and-pig, book.

Well, I think if you take that to the extreme you end up with totalitarian.